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It is common these days for officials at all levels of government to hunt for so-called common sense solutions to social and other problems. Gov. Walker's recently announced proposal to require drug testing of applicants for a variety of welfare programs is among them.

Many people would agree that taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill to provide nutritional and health care assistance to persons who choose to use illegal drugs. When that view is examined through legal, financial and other filters, however, it becomes arguably less clear.

Most studies on the use of drugs among welfare recipients are dated and flawed — relying heavily upon respondent self-report. While some have suggested drug use to be at least marginally higher than among the general population, most have failed to consistently arrive at that conclusion. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health, for example, published findings in 1996 indicating that welfare recipient use of illicit drugs was no greater than that of the rest of the U.S. adult population.

Current day results obtained in the handful of states that have enacted laws to require testing for applicants of aid programs suggest that drug use among welfare recipients may in fact be lower than among the general population. In Florida, where 8.3 percent of state residents are deemed to use illegal drugs, only 2.6 percent of aid applicants tested positive for them. Efforts in Utah and Tennessee identified a mere .3 percent and .2 percent of applicants to be drug users, respectively. Results reported in Arizona are perhaps the most compelling, where only 14 out of 108,000 applicants over a three-year span were denied benefits because of drug use.

Cost factors

In no instances do those results come without cost. Policy experts point out that the governor's proposal in Wisconsin, if enacted, would require several potential costs to be incurred. Included would be costs for test kits, staff to administer the tests, lab fees, modifications to computer programs to include drug testing in eligibility, treatment services and legal fees.

At the same time, no allowance for implementation costs has been included in the governor's budget, and nowhere can an estimate of potential savings to taxpayers be found.

Legal challenges

The likelihood of legal challenges seems almost certain if screening requirements are to stand as described by the governor. Under his proposal, all aid applicants would be subjected to screening and testing. Florida's law, modeled along the same lines, was struck down by a federal appeals court in 2011 after only four months of implementation on the grounds that it violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

That conclusion mirrored a 1999 ruling from Michigan that found a similar law there to establish a "dangerous precedent." The findings suggest that while it may be reasonable to believe that people who have fewer economic and educational opportunities than others may turn to drugs, it does not follow that indigent persons as a class should be viewed as drug users.

If poor people then are no more likely to use drugs than others and the costs to demonstrate that have been shown to outweigh any gains to be made, one has to wonder about the purpose or utility of the governor's proposal. It should be no more reasonable for government to expect accountability and results from the people it serves than for its citizens to expect the same of their government in return. As things currently stand, that test does not appear to be met here.

We can and should applaud the governor and others for promoting reasonable solutions to social and other problems. At the same time, we need them to be clear about the problems they are trying to solve, the measures by which their efforts will be evaluated, and the costs of any requirements involved.

Let's continue the hunt, but let's hunt where the ducks are.

Thomas Eggebrecht is director of the Sheboygan County Health and Human Services Department.